THE OLD New York airport was once called Idlewild, a pastoral welcome to the gate of a zoological garden of free-ranging species. Or so it seemed to say before the names were changed to those of politicians, those who won. Kennedy Airport, international arrival to our hysterical, battered and battering, pot-holed, bankrupt metropolis. A spectacular warehouse this city is; folk from anywhere, especially from those sunny sovereignties to the south of us, coming to peer out of blackened windows, each one in his shelter of sorts.
In 1879 a curious urban structure called the “dumb-bell tenement” won a prize as the most imaginative and useful design for the hordes seeking shelter. Windows looked out upon a rubbish-strewn courtyard, black and empty, giving neither light nor air but surely an improvement on something not previously thought of. Shelter, beautiful word, like dwelling. “Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling.” But utter not the word “shelter” just now, here where it has acquired or grown a scrofulous hide.
Will you not come with me to the Shelter on this icy evening, dear, old homeless one, stuffed into your bag of rags and surrounded by up-standing pieces of cardboard, making as it were a sort of private room on the freeze of concrete near a corner or before a storefront? No, you f—ing little, rat-faced volunteer on vacation from the country club of Wellesley College or piling up credit at the Fordham School of Social Work. I’ll die before I’ll take my bag upon bag of nameless litter, my mangy head, my own, my leprous legs, purple, scabbed, and swollen, my numbed, crooked fingers, myself, to the City Shelter, or flophouse, whatever you call it.
It’s a battle and the blue and white salvation van makes off slowly, idly offering in the gloom of perplexity the wide, public, rectangular barns, the dormitories with their rows of iron beds, muslin sheets, and flattened pillow, and somewhere down a corridor a lukewarm shower. The trouble is, among others, that if you nod off, what you’re there for, you might become separated from your wealth of trash, robbed of your cache of mementos—an old key, a newspaper item perhaps of some paranoid interest, a safety pin, an arcane Welfare Department communication without name or number—things folded into layers of astounding clothing; and worst of all to be with others.
The 1990 Census is trying to take note of them, on the streets, in the tunnels of the subways, hiding behind a bush in the park, or on the lonesome late nights of the West Side Highway in the traffic dividing center, standing by a metal can burning trash for warmth . . . Well, there’s no news in that, not here in New York . . . When you get right down to it, the van driver said, the homeless people are just a bunch of clichés. Are they ever, said the volunteer girl.
In our antiquity, not so many hundred years ago, this place was lying here, entrance to the dreaming acres north, south, and west, lying here waiting for something to happen for what’s new? Waiting for the worn-down explorers trying to get to the Orient, waiting for them to alight from their obdurate, temperamental ships, waiting for a sort of opening night in Manhattan. At last they paddled ashore to our Bay and didn’t find much, indeed “no indigenous civilization,” or so they said. Not much except the usual basking verdure, several dozen or so small wind-rattled shelters made of tree bark, and “the poor Indian.” (Columbus, around Santo Domingo or thereabout, took several of these solemn, long-faced, reddish-brown bodies back to Europe for the curiosity of it and perhaps to amuse his wife, “the well-born Doña Filipa Perestrello e Moniz”; and as a sort of wampum offering the transported native stock was to receive Christian baptism, to implant in innocent minds the Happy Hunting Ground complexities of the Resurrection.)
It was to be New Amsterdam with the Dutch putting up lots for sale and beginning to imagine our fate-laden checkerboard destiny. They bought, in a manner of speaking, the place and strangely the straggling settlers from the Zuider Zee, or IJsselmeer, initiated by a squatter’s rights over the succeeding English, our aristocracy, “old New York,” born in the memory perhaps of the murdered William the Silent. Van Rensselaer, Schuyler, and Schermerhorn, names with a somewhat heraldic resonance, supplanted the Oneida and the Algonquin. And were themselves supplanted in the porous atmosphere of New York which will, by a vivacious regicide, crown more kings and queens in a year than history knows of.
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A gray Sunday afternoon, smoky light, and a sanctified drowsing between our rivers East and West, a quiet except for the sacrificial athleticism of the joggers, running or preparing to run in the park, as a rabbit out of its hutch will surely hop off”. And some comfortable cows still lolling in their stalls on Central Park West. All of this before the tiny white lights come on, a cheerful, if unnatural, decoration strung on the winter tree branches. Cottony brilliant leaves they are as the grinding bus, with a few Sunday evening travelers, makes its way through the underpass in the soft, waxy beauty of the urban evening.
At the Lincoln Center Opera House, papier-mâché stone battlements by the ineffable Zeffirelli, worth, or cost, a couple of million, a piece of the rock. Baudelaire said that what he liked best about the opera was the chandelier and here some invisible hand lowers the large bunch of little globes and raises them before dimming in a pretty display of mechanical superfluity. In 1849, at the Astor Place Opera House, there was a ferocious outbreak of riot, one of peculiar import. On the heath, thunder and lightning, torches and baseball bats “hover through the fog and filthy air.” The occasion was a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in the theater which was then a shrine for the patroons who would trip in satin slippers through the horse droppings at the curb, having emerged from the carriage to leave the coachman in chimney-sweep black out fittings to rust in the long wait for the final curtain. And then it would be off” to the houses, the mansions, edging ever upward from the thirties streets near Madison to the fifties on Fifth Avenue, the way things were going. In the old postcards of the city everything appears gay, small, empty, and tranquil. The swish of long skirts and the gothic ascension of many wonderful hats, worthy people treading the streets, down Broadway, and keeping away from the Plug Uglies, the Dead Rabbits, citizen gangs with their own rancorous claims.
For the Macbeth performance the Anglophiles had brought across the Atlantic a star, William Macready, an innocent elocutionist, on tour. This was seen as an insult to our own master of fustian, Edwin Forrest, and the mob mounted a patriotic stone-throwing, window-smashing, outraged, red-faced, beer-encouraged assault. Poor Macready, eloquence trembling through the dagger irresolution and the pacing melancholy of tomorrow and tomorrow, and at last having surrendered his head to Macduff, was to slink through the back door with a cortège, front and back, of high prestige, among them Washington Irving and John Jacob Astor. Still, the contract was in place and at a later performance thousands gathered to storm the building, stones flying like some hellish hailstorm of local resentment. The rioters were met with three hundred policemen and two hundred state militia who fired into the crowd, killing almost two dozen of the rebels. Macbeth Macready decamped on the next boat to England but the theatrical criticism of the populace, the class gap, the canals of separation, already impassable, represented by the rioters and the merchant class, represented by the point-blank fire, occasioned the usual bitter civic debate, howls ending in a draw.
Herman Melville, home from the cannibals and acquainted with mutiny, getting on fairly well with Omoo and Typee, signed like a good PEN member the first petition favoring the appearance of Macready on the boards. This was before the militia assault and what he might have thought about the state’s forceful, explosive protection of the right to speechifying is not certain. Melville’s mother was a Gansevoort, an “old New Yorker.”
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The emergency ambulance shrills through the night—or is it a fire truck, all glistening red and burnished brass shining in the murk, arriving in multiplication like a tank parade, the men in their black and yellow rubber mantles and their smart, brim-back hats, pirate hats, answering with good fortune this time only a wastebasket conflagration in the banal, sleepless interiors of ABC-TV. As early as seven in the morning, in the winds of winter or the breathless air of summer, the crowds gather outside the building to see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome, that is to see whoever might be interviewed on the morning show.
In 1838, on an arctic evening with temperatures sliding down to seventeen below zero, as if in the brush-strewn fields of Minnesota under a high, cold moon, there was a four-alarm flaming that swept through the stone and timber of the financial district. Thirteen acres turned to frozen rubble. They were soon back on the trading floor, as they are ever to be, mysterious men, condottieri, nowadays tanned from battle in the financing trenches, trim from the rigors of the conference call, nervous and powerful on their steeds, lances drawn, rulers of principalities in the Hamptons or in Beverly Hills. Should they be thrown from their horses they will be bathed in unguents, the precious oils of severance pay and bankruptcy bonuses, settlements. “Day after day the columns of the press revealed fresh scandals to the astonished public, which at last grew indifferent to such revelations. Beneath all the wrangling of the courts, however, while the popular attention was distracted by the clatter of lawyers’ tongues, the leaders in the controversy were quietly approaching a settlement.” (Charles Francis Adams on the Erie Railroad scandals of 1868.) A golden age it has been the last few years and about some of the financiers, soon to be tried and those tried before, you might say they wrote the script and played all the parts.
The men make and the wives spend, indeed are chosen for their talents in consumption, a contract historical, imitative, and pleasurable as the sunshine. But, think what an occupation it is to fill the cathedrals, the vaults and domes on Park Avenue and Fifth. Ten coats of paint on the glaze of the walls and even then, so often, not quite right. A burdensome eclecticism of track lighting and electrified ceiling ornamentations transported from the castles of Europe. In an entrance hall, four or five eighteenth-century Dutch interiors; up higher on the avenue the collector is, as we say, “into” contemporary and thus a Jasper Johns, bought yesterday, hangs over a leather sofa. Everywhere, gregarious tables to hold quaint miniatures, inlaid boxes, Georgian silver items; grand carpets from Xanadu, chairs from France, desks from England, and in the dining hall, large enough for the knights in a saga, rare, fragile practicalities in lots of twenty-four for receiving food and drink. Unassuaged longings, and who would imagine there was so much provenance left or waiting to be sold or traded. “Stone by stone we shall remove the Alhambra, the Kremlin and the Louvre and build them anew on the banks of the Hudson.” (Benjamin de Casseres, Mirrors of New York.) A billion dollars is buying, arranging, dusting and polishing and insuring.
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As for a mere million or two: Nothing much came forth from the red lips, the lithe, stalky, skin and bone woman in a mink tent getting out of the long, black, hired car. She emerges from the tomb and from the defiant optics of the black limousine windows, opaque as death on the outside, but from which she, inside, can look out to see a white poodle on its leash. I wish I had one, she says, and he, from the hearse in which they are driven, says, If you want one, buy one, for God’s sake.
The black tube waits at the curb while they enter and loll for an hour or so, as if in a sudden resurrection, among the tropical plants of the lead-paned restaurant. The little French lamps on the table reveal luscious cakes waiting for the knife. But not for them. Perhaps for the two plump wage-earners from the “boroughs,” maliciously defining address, perhaps for them the infantile fatality of the gorgeous concoctions, all cream and gurgle and clog, life-threatening and shaming. The tomb-dwellers look on from their decaf espressos.
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The delivery boy from the Food Emporium is at the door. Theatrical youth, delivery youth, scarcely a boy. High-top running shoes with the laces slack, in the fashion, hair, also in the fashion, shaved from the nape of the neck to end in a pile at the top of the head beaming straight up as if struck by a thunderbolt—some name-brand mousse or spray helping to defy gravity. Around the streets they go, pushing their archival load: low-sodium seltzer water, kosher hot dogs, low-cholesterol mayo, Perdue chicken breasts, Weight Watchers margarine, four-grain bread, Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Cherry Ice Cream, Paul Newman’s marinara sauce . . . What the deliverer gets from the $2.50 charge for service is a corporate secret, but here he is, deer-fleet, smelling briskly of cologne, on the job.
Slavery came to the Manhattan shores with great promptitude, came to New Amsterdam with black souls gathered up by the prudent Dutch at Curaçao, another of the country’s far-flung “interests.” And more were to arrive later, after Amsterdam gave way to New York. A pitiful insurrection among the slaves of the city took place in 1712, a dream-heavy insufficiency of Black Power it was. A few dozen from Africa, with a musket here and there, went on a rampage, set a few fires, killed a few whites. You see the insurrectionists glistening and trembling, large, agonized, bewildered figures like the Emperor Jones, trying to run for cover up a tree, in a swamp, and soon overcome by the city militia. And taught a lesson, yes, strung up for public viewing, burned, tortured on the wheel. Consequent fear on the streets, in the houses, no place is safe, muggers (derivation unknown) on every corner, too many of them . . . and so on and so on.
There appeared in the fearful city a most extraordinary white lunatic, one Mary Burton, indentured, that is, a citizen from the British Isles working to pay off the cost of the passage to the New World, pay on the credit card more or less, many of them of course declining in clever ways after reaching their destination, here. When fires and robberies broke out, Mary B. began to offer her inside dope gained in taverns, her dense knowledge of barroom alliances for felony. She took her interesting, fevered tales to the courts and thus set the slaveholders on edge for protection and revenge. Slaves hanged, burned at the stake, sent off somewhere, until Mary, wonderfully alert to the great industry of New York, alert to publicity, the magic of it, went astray, far afield, accusing respectable whites, whoever, and at last that was that for Mary. Slavery abolished in New York in 1799, too risky, not worth the bother, bottom-line.
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City of journalism, the lone suitable literary art to catch up, take in this treasure island, open-faced, each street a logo, Fifth Avenue or Tenth Avenue, Duke Ellington Boulevard or Gramercy Park. East Side and West Side, the Village, a transparency, laid out, as easy to read as an advertisement, nothing hidden. You know where you are and who will be there with you, a sort of suburbanism in the air. Someone must be doing the work, coming in of a morning, double-parking, arriving over the bridges and expressways to fix the leaking pipe, to paint the high-gloss walls, lay the Italian tiles, scrape the floors in a gas mask, deliver the heating oil flowing in the long, fat coils. They run the elevators, stand importantly in their tuxedos in the old-fashioned restaurants, and at midnight take the subway train back to Brooklyn or Queens or Flushing or some other stop.
Nothing here in the brilliant inner city for the family man, place of torture and bankruptcy for the guards of the flaking, tedious columns of the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum, for the news dealers, the movie ushers, the night workers with their pails and Dustbusters neatening at Rockefeller Center. The old shops in the West Thirties on Seventh Avenue with their filthy windows announcing WHOLESALE—dusty ribbons for unwanted hats, plastic flowers, buttons and buttonholes, bolts of figured cotton for the homemade house dress, thread for the Singer Sewing Machine, guitar strings: establishments sitting on prime real estate, a joke, you might say, of maladaptation and swept away in a quick fluid movement, as if by the hose from the Sanitation truck.
The Italo-Americans on the street where the deputed mobster lives in a small bungalow with a Mercedes equal in size out front and little sign here of melting in the pot. The Salvadorans, the Dominicans, the Koreans in their fruit stores, the Asian Indians at the newspaper kiosk, hot dog vendors from Greece, huddling together somewhere, each one a secret, inviolable clan, getting by, offering product but, off the income bracket, unAmericanized, still breathing in the hills of home.
The Irish and many of the German immigrants to the city were not attracted to fighting for the Union and in honor of the Emancipation Proclamation. So, when the Conscription Act was passed in 1863, falling largely on the working classes and the unemployed whites without the money to buy off, the great Draft Riots broke out. The Irish, objects of contempt in New York and Boston, did not always share the Yankee high-minded grief for the stain of slavery on the national psyche. The Rainbow Coalition of Protestant, well-to-do abolitionists and the black population was the same as it is now at the reign of our first black mayor. A horror of class and race war fell on the streets of Manhattan in 1863 as the rioters attacked the police, set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum, lynched, broke into white abolitionist homes, set upon Horace Greeley’s left-wing paper, the Tribune, and sent him flying out the back door or hiding under a table in fear of his life. “It was the women who inflicted the most fiendish tortures upon Negroes, soldiers, and policemen captured by the mob, slicing their flesh with butcher knives, ripping out eyes and tongues, and applying the torch after victims had been sprayed with oil and hanged on a tree.” (The Gangs of New York, by Herbert Asbury.)
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The explorers seldom came to a good end. Columbus died in want, ignorant of the fame that would attach his name to New York City banks, avenues, universities, restaurants, dry-cleaning establishments, video centers, delis—and many more. Sir Walter Raleigh, after smoking tobacco and eating the corn of the New World in Virginia, got into trouble with the Spanish and was beheaded in London. “What a head fell there,” said the executioner. Verrazano was killed by the natives in the West Indies. Henry Hudson and his son, after a leveraged buyout of the Hudson Bay Company, were cast adrift to die up near Labrador, never to see the Palisades again.
The truest New Yorker among the great seamen was Captain Kidd, who, in his span of years, kept going and coming here, married a respectable and prosperous widow, Sarah Oort, and had a daughter, built himself a brick house and gathered up other properties. In the colonial period, Captain Kidd could be said to know everyone worth knowing; he knew the legislator Robert Livingston and the colonial governor of New England, Lord Bellomont, both of whom were mixed up in his affairs and maritime assignments and both abandoned him. Captain Kidd, sent out to hunt pirates, was accused of turning pirate himself and of murdering a troublesome seaman during a quarrel. The captain left some treasure from the legal looting of captured ships at Gardiner’s Island on Long Island and left in romantic minds the possibilities of hidden treasure elsewhere. Like our own, finally sentenced to death or long imprisonment, he has had his defenders, investigative reporters telling a different story. As for him, his defense is familiar to New York ears: “I am the innocentest person of them all, only I have been sworn against by perjured persons.”
The noble mariners of old, taking off without a space suit and nobody back in Europe on Mission Control, endured great suffering and often with little profit to themselves. But, of course, they would discover this America and the other America, South. And yet imagine the United States at last, each state with its boundaries and climate, mountains or flatlands for wheat; imagine all the states with their borders and squawking pride without the immense, obstinate, un-assimilable, violently fluent New York City. Imagine the sulky provinciality of a vast country freed from this “unAmerican” city with its intimidating statistics of bodies, crimes, dope, guns, homicide records, robberies, illiterates, poverty, its blank towers, mausoleums hanging over the edge of the two rivers and blighting the rigid intersections in between, and its turbulent campaigns of consumption in the imperial mode.
From where have you come and why are you here? Why does the hummingbird return to the north? A puzzle, each resident of the recalcitrant city a puzzle. Once here a lingering infection seems to set in and the streets are filled with the complaints and whines of the hypochondriac who will not budge, will not face a fertile pasture. Here it is, that’s all, the place itself, shadowy, ever promising and ever withholding, a bad mother, queen of the double-bind . . . Nevertheless.
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your cornfields and orchards,
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields where the Ninth-month bees hum;
Give me faces and streets—give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs!
Whitman
The constellations are not visible in the evening sky because of our impressive interference. Perhaps there, suddenly, is the red star, Deneb, United Airlines coming into port, edging down so gracefully with its rosy flickering lights, an everlasting beacon in the overloaded sky, saying, prepare for landing.
1990